It is going to take a bit of trial and error before I get this right, I am just learning the ropes of posting in Hebrew. I would appreciate any comment on how I have broken up the lines. The text I am using as a source has commas rather more frequently than I would expect.

One of the really puzzling things for translators of this verse is how to render two different Hebrew words שִׁירוּ andזַמְּרוּ with two different words in English.

שִׁיר

1. sing

זמּר

1. play an instrument2. praise3. sing

Here are how the two words are translated in three different Latin versions which served as models for the English translations.

Latin conveniently has two almost identical words which can be used here, canto and cano. However, Pagnini used psallo a transliteration of the the Greek ψαλλω "to sing or play music." The real problem was how to poetically render the Hebrew זמּר and the Greek ψαλλω, first into Latin and for us, into English.

While some of the early translations, for example, the Bishops' Bible, preserve the word "psalm", "sing a psalm unto his name," almost every other version uses some form of "sing praise". But once again, I have found a thoughtful alternative in Rotherham's Bible.

Sing ye to God,Make music of his Name, -Lift up (a song),to him that rideth through the waste plains, -Since Yah is his name,exult ye before him.

The tension here is that English really lacks the full complement of verbs for making music. As an aside, it is worth noting that for this verse "sing praises" seems to come from lobsingen in German. However, in line 2, the English and German diverge. Luther has used "the desert" from Jerome's Hebrew Psalter and the KJV has used "heavens" from Pagnini. I am sure that each decision was made with reference to the Hebrew original and required much discussion.

There are many roadblocks in the way of a translator. What should one do when there are two different words in the source language and only one in the target language? What if you have to use two words in English to translate one in Hebrew? How does that affect the rhythm of the translation?

2 Comments:

I find that Mechon Mamre's Hebrew Bible (as opposed to their Hebrew-English version) is much better for copy/pasting. You can find it linked at the top of the Hebrew-English main page. It has no western punctuation, IIRC, but it also doesn't read well in Mozilla Firefox. It's fine in Internet Explorer, though (which I keep for the purpose).

It does mean navigating the page with no English clues, which can be a challenge.

Also, have you installed Hebrew language and a Hebrew keyboard on your computer? Once you do that, you can switch to Hebrew on your language bar, highlight the commas (remembering to drag RTL -- right to left) and delete. I will tell you that it doesn't always work. Don't know why. I think RTL is just too much of a challenge for some computers.

Thank you, Talmida, I would never have thought of trying their Hebrew vs E-H Bible.

I am used to most the eccentricities of posting Greek, but not Hebrew. I must hae installed the Hebrew lg support a while ago, since I can toggle back and forth to Hebrew with the alt key. Then I use the keyboard for things like putting in a word here and there that is not in the same form as the one in the text I am copying from.

But I had not got so far as deleting the commas, they do look a little off to me.

I can read Hebrew in a basic sort of way, so really I shouldn't have too much trouble finding my way around. However, I haven't been able to indent the R to L text in from the margin the way I can with L to R text.

I just don't feel that I can manipulate the text the way I want to for posting yet. I'll keep working at it. I appreciate your tips.

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